Speaking on his “700 Club” TV show on Tuesday, televangelist and former GOP presidential candidate Pat Robertson urged wives everywhere to use sex in order to reward their husbands for doing chores.

After listening to a letter from a female viewer detailing her husband’s habit of wanting outsize credit whenever he washes a dish or sweeps the floor, Robertson told the letter writer that she needs to “understand the male psyche.”

“The male wants to do something for his wife; he wants to provide for his family,” Robertson explained. “And when he cleans up, it’s saying, ‘I love you.’ That is his way of saying to you, ‘I love you.’ And you’ve got to understand that’s what it is … and you are supposed to say to him, ‘Darling, you are wonderful and I love you, too.’”

“Instead of that,” Robertson chided, “you’re saying, ‘We’ve got a deal. We have a partnership.’ Now, do you want to have a loving, warm, sensuous, exciting marriage — or do you want to have a partnership?” Robertson went on to argue that expecting a husband to his fair share of chores without always receiving praise for doing so was a recipe for creating a business-like, loveless, cold and purely transactional marriage.

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Taking the conversation into a realm few if any would like to see him go, Robertson then intimated that what a wife should really do whenever her husband deigns to chip in on the chores. “With each dish he’s saying, ‘I love you,’” Robertson said, “and if you understood that and you say, ‘Darling, I got a treat for you … wait ’til we get behind closed doors and you’ll see the treat I have for you’” then, presumably, good things will happen.